A GREAT AMERICAN – In April 2008, Dave Brubeck and Dick Golden, former host of the Nightlights radio show on Cape Cod, chat at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., about the life and music of Duke Ellington. In 1954, TIME magazine put Brubeck on its cover; rather than feeling elated, Brubeck was upset that he had been given that distinction before Ellington.

Take five, Dave.

A day before his 92nd birthday, Dave Brubeck died on his way to an appointment with his cardiologist. In one of those interesting coincidences of life, his death was pronounced at the hospital where I was born, in Norwalk, Conn., and that small happenstance was not the first of many times our lives intersected.

For a number of years when I was a teenager, my mother served as executive secretary to the First Selectman (sort of like a town manager or a mayor) of the town of Wilton, Conn., where Brubeck lived with his family and where they survive him. He would come into her office every once in a while for a building permit or something of the sort.

A little later, in college, I thought I had reached the heights of sophistication when I walked down the hallway of a dorm and heard “Take Five” playing from someone’s stereo. I had never been huge on rock ‘n’ roll and had just assumed that when you got to college you listened to jazz instead, and the sound of “Take Five” in that corridor just had me walking on air.

After graduation, my then husband-to-be and I were friendly with a person who had a copy of Brubeck’s oratorio TheLight in the Wilderness. The piece sets some of the sayings of Jesus to music, some of it jazz, some of it Middle-Eastern inflected, some of it very danceable in the professional sense. We set out on a years-long quest to find our own copy and finally succeeded. That recording remains a treasure for us.

We have made two pilgrimages to see and hear Dave Brubeck.

One was to a high school in Newport, R.I., to hear another of his biblical oratorios, The Gates of Justice. By then, someone had to help him walk to the piano. But, oh my, when he began to play he didn’t need anyone’s help.

Another trip took us to the Berkshires. My husband had gotten wind of a Brubeck concert in Pittsfield that was around the time of my husband’s birthday. He wanted that concert as his gift.

We shared an Italian dinner with some of my husband’s family before we headed for a concert hall that was quickly filling to capacity. A local high school band opened the show, and they began with a piece that started with just a few notes on a piano.

A very young man – I would guess a freshman and brand new to piano – started the set with a few simple notes with the right hand only. Then the band started to swing.

But one of the great moments happened just after the young man played. Brubeck himself slipped onto the stage and laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder. The boy was braving his first solo, and Dave Brubeck was braving the challenges of age to bless him with the laying on of hands.

Dave Brubeck bridged the whole of the twentieth-century history of the United States, according to oral histories I have seen and heard of him.

One defining experience was his service in World War II. He told Walter Cronkite about the extra-big shoes that had to be made for him before he was shipped overseas and how he had to swim ashore to Europe with them around his neck. He wrote a piece of music about when his unit built a bridge that crossed the Rhine that he based on a rhythm that the machinery created. Even then, Private Brubeck showed an interest in unusual time signatures.

Most wrenching to see is a video in the Ken Burns series about jazz in which Brubeck talks about the human cost of slavery.

A native of California, the son of a cattleman, Brubeck broke down in tears as he told of the time his father asked a ranch hand, a former slave, to take off his shirt so that the young Dave could see the brand on his skin.

Brubeck had more than ninety years of life, many of them measured by experiments in musical time, and spanning from the branded torso of a former slave to the young shoulders of a new pianist. He fought the Nazi evil and brought a fresh approach to the Gospels.

He and his wife Iola wrote a beautiful work called “Summer Song” that begins, “Love, to me, is like a summer day.” It asks, “Why must summer ever end?”

Because, for all of us as for Dave Brubeck, the time comes to take five.